Life on earth began in the ocean, so it just stands to reason that if life exists on other planets it may be found not on the land but in the sea. Expanding the search for extraterrestrial life to the waters also gives scientists a wealth of new options in the search for life, including the frozen moons encircling Jupiter and Saturn. As many as five of these satellites are thought to harbor oceans underneath those icy crusts.
Scientists are taking the search for extraterrestrial life to the high seas with two voyages now taking shape in the lab. If everything goes according to plan in about a decade a mission will launch to send a pair of probes to explore the moons of Jupiter. These probes will concentrate on Europa and Ganymede, and they will focus on exploring the oceans that may lurk beneath the surface.
A few years after the mission to the moons of Jupiter launches, an even more ambitious mission will explore the moons of Saturn. This ambitious probe will explore the polar seas thought to lurk beneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The same mission will also explore the seas of Titan, long considered a leading candidate for extraterrestrial life.
These modern missions will use a decidedly old fashioned approach to space exploration ”“ namely a hot air balloon that will hover over the deserts and mountains of the satellites, along with a boat designed to float on an ocean of liquid hydrocarbon.
This unique mission was first announced in February of 2009 as a joint venture of NASA and European Space Agency. Both the mission to Jupiter and the mission to Saturn are now in their critical early planning stages, but once those missions lift off they will provide a unique view of some of the most promising locations in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
As it stands now the plan is for the Europe Jupiter System Mission, or EISM, to lift off early in 2020. The mission will proceed in two stages, with the NASA sponsored Jupiter Europa Orbiter and the European Space Agency’s Ganymede Orbiter due to be launched within a month of one another. The two spacecrafts will plot a parallel course for Jupiter, taking six years to reach their respective destinations. Once the probes reach the moons of Jupiter they will explore several of the planet’s satellites before each probe moves on to its primary target ”“ Europa and Ganymede respectively.
What makes these probes unique is the fact that they will explore not only the surface of each satellite but the depths of the moons as well. As far back as the Voyager space missions scientists have suspected that the frozen crust of these satellites hides a liquid ocean, and the presence of a liquid ocean could greatly boost the chances that extraterrestrial life is lurking within the confines of our own solar system. While other exploration has focused on the possibility of life on planets orbiting distant stars, these upcoming missions take a much more local approach to the hunt for life beyond the bounds of Earth.
In order to complete their missions the orbiters will be equipped with special radar designed to penetrate the thick polar ice covering the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. If this crust of ice is relatively thin ”“ only a few kilometers ”“ that ice penetrating radar may even be able to peer into the deep ocean beneath the surface. But even if the ice sheet is too thick for direct observation these probes are expected to shed new light on the features of these moons, providing scientists with a wealth of new information that could lead to clues about not only the existence of life but the formation of the solar system.
by beconrad